Happy Christmas, and thankyou, from the Urban Technologist

December 18, 2012 Leave a comment

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(The Empire State Building as seen from Greenwich Village, New Year’s Eve 2006)

As 2012 draws to a close, I’d like to look back briefly at the first year of “The Urban Technologist”.

Whilst I first opened this WordPress account in 2008, I used it rather sporadically as a personal blog, with a loose focus on emerging technology.

But 12 months ago I decide to write in a more regular and focused way about my work in Smarter Cities. My motivation was to share that experience and to start new conversations that I could learn from.

I have spent 15 years as a technologist, identifying new trends, and delivering projects to exploit them. That has never been simple; often exciting; and always full of challenges. But in cities I have experienced over the last few years by far the most complex, subtle, beautiful, challenging and meaningful contexts for that work in my career.

It is always useful to understand one’s own strengths and limitations; and early on I realised that my amateur enthusiasm was not a sufficient basis from which to build a real understanding of cities. So I have consciously built new relationships with planners, architects, policy-makers, social enterprises, businesses and many of the other stakeholders who understand cities professionally; or who play a role in them. In the process, I have met an astonishing variety of people, all of whom taught me something; often through conversations in which they disagreed with me – or at least expanded my thinking – in interesting ways.

Social media, and in particular this blog, have given me the most incredible opportunity to extend those discussions: through comments posted on the blog itself; through discussions in the Linked-In groups I belong to; and through the wonderful conversations I have in person whenever I meet someone who’s read something I have written.

I’ve commented in many articles on this blog that new conversations between the stakeholders and communities in a city ecosystem are the key to creating the common interest and understanding needed to drive a city forward. That same principle applies to the creation of knowledge within the wider community of Smart Cities and future urbanism. I hope that by writing this blog, and by basing it on the insights discovered through the conversations I take part in, I have contributed in a small way to that community.

(The thoughtful statue floating in Barcelona's docks that I use as the header image for this blog)

(The thoughtful statue floating in Barcelona’s docks that I use as the header image for this blog)

I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off over Christmas; but I will use the break to update the “Six steps to a Smarter City” article that I maintain as a structured guide to the content on this blog.

Recent articles that I’ll add links to include the review of the decision-making, financing and governance processes that successful Smart City initiatives have followed in “Smart ideas for everyday cities” and “No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter“; the description of the engineering and information technologies that make Smarter city systems possible in “Pens, paper, and conversations. And the other technologies that will make cities Smarter.“; and the more philosophical discussions of the organic innovation that city environments – including their information infrastructures – should support and enable in “Inspirational Simpli-city“, “Zen and the art of messy urbanism” and “Should technology improve cities, or should cities improve technology?“.

In the meantime, though, I’d like to say Happy Christmas; and also thankyou to everyone who has read this blog or commented on it; and to everyone who’s thinking has informed and inspired me. I look forward to continuing our conversation in 2013.

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Smart ideas for everyday cities

December 13, 2012 8 Comments

(Artist’s impression of the new Birmingham City University campus, currently under construction alongside Millennium Point and the new Eastside City Park. Image by Birmingham City University.)

The outcomes that matter to cities and to the people who live and work in them, such as wellbeing, job creation, economic growth, and social mobility, are complex, compound results of the behaviour of a combination of city systems such as education, public safety, transport and the economy.

Because those systems are operated by separate organisations – if they are even “operated” as systems at all – many “Smarter City” discussions are concerned with “breaking down silos” in order to integrate them.

As Fast Company’s 2010 survey of the “Top 20 Smartest Cities on the Planet“, illustrates, many of the earliest and highest profile examples of cities pursuing “Smart” agendas were governed by hierarchical, integrated systems of authority which helped them to address this challenge – often because they were new or expanding cities in rapidly growing economies.

Elsewhere, governance is more complex. Particularly in the UK, services such as utilities and transport are operated by private sector providers contracted to deliver performance and financial measures that cannot easily be changed. It is hard enough to agree common objectives across a city; it can be even harder to agree how to make investments to achieve them by transforming city systems that are subcontracted in this way.

But that is what cities must somehow do. And in recent weeks I have valued some open and frank discussions between city leaders, financiers and developers, policy makers, academics, architects, planners – and even some technologists – that have revealed some simple ideas that are common to those cities that have demonstrated how it can be done.

Start new partnerships

Most initiatives that contribute to city-wide outcomes require either co-ordinated action across city systems; or an investment in one system to achieve an outcome that is not a simple financial return within that system. For example, the ultimate objective of many changes to transportation systems is to improve economic growth and productivity, or to reduce environmental impact.

(The members of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission)

A programme of initiatives with these characteristics therefore involves the resources and interests of great many organisations within a city; and may lead to the creation of entirely new organisations. Special purpose vehicles such as  the “Eco-Island” Community Interest Company on the Isle of Wight and the Birmingham District Energy Company are two such examples.

New partnerships between these organisations are needed to agree city-wide objectives, and to co-ordinate their activities and investments to achieve them. Depending on local challenges,  opportunities, and relationships those partnerships might include:

  • Local Authorities and other public sector agencies co-operating to operate shared services;
  • Central government bodies involved in negotiations of policy, responsibility and financing such as “City Deals“;
  • Leaders from cities’ business, entrepreneurial and SME communities;
  • Local Universities who may have domain expertise in city systems; and who provide skills into the local economy;
  • Neighbourhood, faith and community associations;
  • Representatives of the third sector – charities, voluntary associations, social enterprises and co-operatives;
  • Industry sector and cultural organisations;
  • Service and technology providers who form partnerships with cities; for example, Amey have a 25-year PFI partnership with Birmingham; IBM operate joint research programmes with cities such as Dublin and Moscow; and Cisco have partnerships with cities such as Songdo in South Korea;
  • Financiers, for example local venture capitalists such as MidVen in the West Midlands, or banks and financial services companies with a strong local presence;
  • … and there are many other possibilities.

To attract the various forms of investment that are required to support a programme of “Smart” initiatives, these partnerships need to be decision-making entities, such as Manchester’s “New Economy” Commission, not discussion groups. They need to take investment decisions together in the interest of their shared objectives; and they need a mature understanding and agreement of how risk is shared and managed across those investments.

Such partnerships do not start by adopting the approach of any single member; they start with a genuine discussion to build understanding and consensus.

For example, public and private sector organisations both tend to assume that the other is better placed to accept risk. Private sector organisations make profits and invest them in new products and markets, so surely they can take on risk? Public sector organisations are funded to predictable levels through taxation, so surely they can take on risk?

In reality, the private sector has lost jobs, faced falling profits, and seen many businesses fail in recent years. Meanwhile, public sector is burdened with unprecedented budget cuts and in many cases significant deficits that are threatening their ability to deliver frontline services. Both are therefore risk averse.

A working partnership will only form if such issues are discussed openly so that an equitable consensus is achieved.

(A video describing the partnership between IBM and Dubuque, Iowa, which aims to develop a model for sustainable communities of less than 200,000 people)

Size matters; but not absolutely

Manchester’s New Economy Commission have taken a particular approach that is commensurate to the size of the Greater Manchester area and economy, coordinated by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA). But their approach is not the only one.

Elsewhere, Southampton City Council are creating a “Virtual Local Authority”, together with other authorities around the country, as a vehicle to approach the bond market for a £100 million investment. They believe such a vehicle can create an investment opportunity of similar size to Birmingham’s “Energy Savers” scheme.

“Size” in these terms can mean geographic area; population; economic value or market potential. It is interpreted differently by international investment funds; or by local interests such as property and business owners. And it is balanced against complexity: one reason that some more modestly sized cities such as Sunderland and Peterborough have made so much early progress is their relative political and economic simplicity.

Vision, Transparency and Consistency

Whatever specific form a local partnership takes, it needs to demonstrate certain behaviours and characteristics in order that its initiatives and proposals are attractive to investors. They are straightforward in themselves;  but take time to establish amongst a new group of stakeholders:

  • A clear, agreed and consistent set of goals;
  • A mutual understanding of risk; how it is shared; and how it is managed;
  • An ability to express investment opportunities, including the risks associated with them, to potential investors;
  • A track record of taking transparent, consistent decisions to coordinate projects and investments against their objectives.

This is the model that in many cases will deliver Smarter City projects and programmes in everyday cities: a model of several organisations coordinating multiple investments, rather than individual organisations managing their own budgets.

(Philippe Petit’s remarkable tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974 at a height of 417 metres. Image from Carolina Pastrana)

Match risks to the right investors

There are many sources of funding for Smart City initiatives; each has different requirements and capabilities, and is attracted by specific risks and rewards. And with traditional markets such as property stagnant in developed economies, new opportunities for investment are being sought.

However, with a high degree of uncertainty in the prospects for future economic growth, it is harder than ever to assess the likely returns from investment opportunities. And when those opportunities are presented as new forms of partnership, special purpose vehicles or social enterprises, or by public sector authorities adopting revenue-generating models to compensate for dramatic cuts in their traditional funding, that assessment becomes even harder.

There is no simple answer to this challenge; but once again progress to resolving it will begin with conversations that build understanding. Ultimately, investors will be attracted to proposals with well defined and managed risks from organisations exhibiting good governance; and that can demonstrate a track record of making clear decisions to achieve their goals.

Of course, some Smart City projects are highly innovative, and may be too risky for investors accustomed to supporting infrastructure projects such as transportation and property development.  This is particularly the case for schemes that require a change in consumer behaviour – for example, switching from private car ownership to the use of “car clubs” or car-sharing schemes.

These sorts of project may be more suited to technology or service providers who might invest in pilot schemes in order to develop or prove new offerings which, if successful, can generate follow-on sales elsewhere. The “First of a Kind” programme in IBM’s Research division is one example or a formal programme that is operated for this purpose.

Similarly, Venture Capital will make investments in new businesses with higher risk profiles – demanding, of course, a commensurately higher level of return. And government backed innovation funds such as the European Union FP7 programme or the UK’s Technology Strategy Board are also available.

All of these organisations, of course, are looking to invest in projects which are initially small scale; but that will eventual develop into a widespread market opportunity. They will therefore be drawn to projects that take place in a stable, supported context from which that opportunity can be developed – in other words, the same level of partnership working, governance, transparency and consistency.

(A successful urban intervention: the “Container City” incubation hub for social enterprises operated by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES) in Sunderland. SES support hundreds of new businesses and social enterprises in Sunderland every year, with a combined turnover of around £25m, and employing thousands of people from the city’s most challenged communities. 82% of the people they help to start a business or a social enterprise were previously unemployed, and after 2 years nearly three quarters are still in business.)

Exploit success to build momentum

Most cities need to stimulate economic growth, and to revitalise economically and socially deprived neighbourhoods.

It may be more effective to achieve those goals through a series of related steps, than through a single initiative, however:

1. Invest to reinforce growth that is already taking place – it may be more straightforward in the first place to use mechanisms such as tax increment financing or private investment to accelerate growth that is already taking place; such as last week’s announcement by David Cameron of additional government and corporate investment in London’s “Tech City” cluster.

2. Retain the financial benefits resulting from growth – Manchester’s New Economy Commission is able to retain the benefits of the growth the stimulate in the form of increased tax returns, in order to reinvest in subsequent initiatives. Their early successes built confidence amongst investors in the viability of their ongoing programme.

3. Recycle funds to stimulate new growth – having built an initial level of confidence, returns from early projects can be reinvested in areas with more significant challenges; where new infrastructures such as broadband connectivity or support services are required to attract new business activity.

Everywhere is different

Whilst the ideas I’ve described in this article do seem to be emerging as common characteristics of successful Smarter City programmes; we are still at a relatively early stage.

In particular, not enough examples exist for us to reliably separate generally viable elements of these approaches from those aspects that are strongly tied to specific local contexts.

Every city of course is different; and in this context has different access to transport systems, and to national and international supply chains and markets; has different demographics and social character; and different economic capacity. Even within a country, the governance of cities and regions varies – in the UK, for example, the relationships between Central, County, District, City and Borough Councils are subtly different everywhere. So each city still needs to find its own path.

But the first step is simple. There is nothing stopping cities from having the conversations that will get them started. And those that have done so are proving that it works.

I’d like to thank the delegates and attendees at many workshops and meetings I’ve attended in recent weeks; the discussions I’ve been lucky enough to participate in as a result have contributed significantly to the views expressed in this article. They include:

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Pens, paper and conversations. And the other technologies that will make cities Smarter.

December 6, 2012 13 Comments

(Akihabara Street in Tokyo, a centre of high technology, photographed by Trey Ratcliff)

(Akihabara Street in Tokyo, a centre of high technology, photographed by Trey Ratcliff)

A great many factors will determine the future of our cities – for example, human behaviour, demographics, economics, and evolving thinking in urban planning and architecture.

The specific terms “Smart Cities” and “Smarter Cities”, though, are commonly applied to the concept that cities can exploit technology to find new ways to face their challenges. Boyd Cohen of Fast Company offered a useful definition in his article “The Top 10 Smart Cities On The Planet“:

“Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICT) to be more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life, and reduced environmental footprint–all supporting innovation and the low-carbon economy.”

Some technology developments – such as Service-Oriented Architecture and distributed computing are technically cohesive and can be defined by a particular architecture. Others, however, are more loosely defined. For instance, “Web 2.0” – a term associated with the emergence of social media, smartphones and businesses such as e-Bay, Facebook and Twitter – was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2003 as a banner to capture the idea that internet and related technologies had once again become valuable sources of innovation following the “dot.com crash”.

So what are the technologies that will make cities Smart?

To answer that question, we need to examine the convergence of two domains of staggering complexity, and of which the outcomes are hard to predict.

The first is the domain of cities: vast, overlapping systems of systems. Their behaviour is the aggregated behaviour of their hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens. Whilst early work is starting to understand the relationship between those systems in a quantitative and deterministic way, such as the City Protocol initiative, we are just at the start of that journey.

(An early example of the emerging technologies that are blurring the boundary between the physical world and information: Professor Kevin Warwick, who in 2002 embedded a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system. Photo by M1K3Y)

The second domain is technology. We are experiencing phenomenal growth in the availability of information and the invention of new forms of communication. In 2007, more new information was created in one year than in the preceding 5000 years. And whilst the telephone, invented in the mid-19th Century, took around 100 years to become widespread, internet-based communication tools such as Twitter can spread to hundreds of millions of users within a few years.

If we define a “new form of communication” as a means of enabling new patterns of exchange of information between individuals, rather than as a new underlying infrastructure, then we are inventing them – such as foursquare, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest – at a faster rate than at any previous time in history.

The discovery and exchange of ideas enabled by these technologies is increasing the rate of invention across many other fields of endeavour, including science and engineering. Indeed, this was deliberate: the evolution of the internet is closely entwined with the need of scientists and engineers to collaborate with each other. I recently surveyed some of the surprising new technologies, and their applications in cities, that are emerging as a result – including materials that grow themselves, 3D printing and mind-reading headsets.

So whilst common patterns are emerging from some Smarter City solutions – for example, the “Digital Cities Exchange” research programme at Imperial College, London; the “FI-WARE” project researching the core platform for the “future internet”; the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC)“; and IBM’s own “Intelligent Operations Centre” all share a similar architecture – there is no single platform, architecture or technology that defines “Smart Cities”. Rather, the term defines a period in time in which we have collectively realized that it is critically important to explore the application of new technologies to change the way city systems work to make them more efficient, more equitable and more resilient in the face of the economic, environmental and social challenges facing us.

My own profession is information technology; and I spend much of my time focussed on the latest developments in that field. But in the context of cities, it is a relatively narrow domain. More broadly, developments in many disciplines of science, engineering and technology offer new possibilities for cities of the future.

I find the following framework useful in understanding the various engineering, information and communication technologies that can support Smart City projects. As with the other articles I post to this blog, this is not intended to be comprehensive or definitive – it’s far too early in the field for that; but I hope it is nevertheless a useful contribution.

And I will also find a place in it for one of the oldest and most important technologies that our species has invented: language; and it’s exploitation in “Smart” systems such as pens, paper and conversations.

1. Re-engineering the physical components of city systems

(Kohei Hayamizu’s first attempt to capture energy from pedestrian footfall in Shibuya, Tokyo)

The machinery that supports city systems generally converts raw materials and energy into some useful output. The efficiency of that machinery is limited by theory and engineering. The theoretical limit is created by the fact that machinery operates by transforming energy from one form – such as electricity – into another form – such as movement or heat. Physical laws, such as the Laws of Thermodynamics, limit the efficiency of those processes.

For example, the efficiency of a refrigerator is limited by the fact that it will always use some energy to create a temperature gradient in order that heat can be removed from the contents of the fridge; it then requires additional energy to actually perform that heat removal. Engineering challenges then further reduce efficiency – in the example of the fridge, because its moving components create heat and noise.

One way to improve the efficiency of city systems is to improve the efficiency of the machinery that supports them; either by adopting new approaches (for example, switching from petrol-fuelled to hydrogen-fuelled vehicles), or by increasing the engineering efficiency of existing approaches (for example, using turbo-chargers to increase the efficiency of petrol and diesel engines).

Examples of this approach include:

  • Using new forms of energy exchange, for example, capturing energy from vibrations caused by footfall;
  • Using more efficient energy generation or exchange technologies – such as re-using the heat from computers to heat offices, or using renewable bio-, wind-, or solar energy sources;
  • Using new transport technologies for people, resources or goods that changes the economics of the size and frequency of transport; or of the endpoints and routes – such as underground recycling networks;
  • Replacing transport with other technologies – such as online collaboration;
  • Reducing wastage and inefficiencies in operation,such as the creation of heat and noise – for example, by switching to lighting technologies such as LED that create less heat.

2. Using information  to optimise the operation of city systems

(Photo of a smart parking meter in San Francisco by Jun Seita)

In principle, we can instrument and collect data from any aspect of the systems that support cities; use that data to draw insight into their performance; and use that insight to improve their performance and efficiency in realtime. The ability to do this in practical and affordable ways is relatively new; and offers us the possibility to support larger populations at a higher standard of living whilst using resources more efficiently.

There are challenges, of course. The availability of communication networks to transmit data from where it can be measured to where it can be analysed cannot be assumed. 3G and Wi-Fi coverage is much less complete at ground level, where many city infrastructure components are located, than at head height where humans use mobile phones. And these technologies require expensive, power-hungry transmitters and receivers. New initiatives and startups such as Weightless and SigFox are exploring the creation of communication technologies that promise widespread connectivity at low cost and with low power usage, but they are not yet proven or established.

Despite those challenges, a variety of successful examples exist. Shutl and Carbon Voyage, for example, both use recently emerged technologies to match capacity and demand across networks of transport suppliers; thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the transport systems in the cities where they operate. The Eco-Island Community Interest Company on the Isle of Wight are applying similar concepts to the supply and demand of renwable energy.

Some of the common technologies that enable these solutions at appropriate levels of cost and complexity, are:

3. Co-ordinating the behaviour of multiple systems to contribute to city-wide outcomes

Many city systems are “silos” that have developed around engineering infrastructures or business and operational models that have evolved since city infrastructures were first laid down. In developed markets, those infrastructures may be more than a century old – London’s underground railway was constructed in the mid 19th Century, for example.

But the “outcomes” sought by cities, neighbourhoods and communities – such as social mobility, economic growth, wellbeing and happiness, safety and sustainability – are usually a consequence of a complex mix of effects of the behaviour of many of those systems – energy, economy, transport, healthcare, retail, education, policing and so on.

As information about the operation and performance of those systems becomes increasingly available; and as our ability to make sense of and exploit that information increases; we can start to analyse, model and predict how the behaviour of city systems affects each other, and how those interactions contribute to the overall outcomes of cities, and of the people and communities in them.

IBM’s recent “Smarter Cities Challenge” in my home city of Birmingham studied detailed maps of the systems in the city and their inputs and outputs, and helped Birmingham City Council understand how to developed those maps into a tool to predict the outcomes of proposed policy changes. In the city of Portland, Oregon, a similar interactive tool has already been produced. And Amsterdam and Dublin have both formed regional partnerships to share and exploit city information and co-ordinate portfolios of projects across city systems and agencies driven by common, city-wide objectives.

(A video describing the “systems dynamics” project carried out by IBM in Portland, Oregon to model the interactions between city systems)

We are in the very early stages of developing our ability to quantitatively understand the interrelationships between city systems in this way; but it is already possible to identify some of the technologies that will assist us in that process – in addition to those I mentioned in the previous section:

  • Cloud computing platforms, which enable data from multiple city systems to be co-located on a single infrastructure; and that can provide the “capacity on demand” to apply analytics and visualisation to that data when required.
  • Information and transaction integration technologies which join up data from multiple sources at a technical level; including master data management, and Service Orientated Architecture.
  • Information models for city systems that model the quantitative and semantic relationships between those systems.
  • Service brokerage capabilities to co-ordinate the behaviour of the IT systems that monitor and control city systems; and the service and data catalogues that make those systems and their information available to those brokers.
  • Federated security and identity management to enable citizens and city workers to seamlessly interact with services and information across city systems.
  • Dashboards and other user interface technologies which can present information and services from multiple sources to humans in an understandable and meaningful way.

4. Creating new marketplaces to encourage sustainable choices, and attract investment

As I’ve argued on many occasions on this blog, it is often important or useful to conceive of Smarter City solutions as marketplaces. Such thinking encourages us to consider how the information associated with city services can be used to influence individual choices and their collective impact; and the money-flows in marketplaces can be used to create business cases to support investment in new infrastructure.

The examples in transport innovation that I mentioned earlier in this article, Shutl and Carbon Voyage, can both be thought of as business that exploit information to operate new marketplaces for transport capacity. Eco-island have applied the same concept in energy; Streetline in car-parking; and Big Barn and Sustaination in business-to-consumer and business-to-business models for food distribution.

In addition to those I’ve previously described, systems that operate as transactional marketplaces often involve the following technologies:

Conversations, paper, technology

The articles I write on this blog cover many aspects of technology, future cities, and urbanism. In several recent articles, including this one, I have focussed in particular on issues concerning the application of technology to city systems.

I believe these issues are important. It is inarguable that technology has been changing our world since human beings first used tools; and overall the rate of change has been accelerating ever since. That acceleration has been particularly rapid in the past few decades. The fact that this blog, which costs me nothing to write other than my own time, has been read by people from 117 countries this year – including you – is just one very mundane example of something that would have been completely unthinkable when I started my University education.

But I absolutely do not want to give the impression that technology is the most important element of the future of cities; or that every “Smarter City” project requires all – or even any – of the technologies that I’ve described in this article.

Cities are about people; life is about people. Nothing matters unless it matters to people. In themselves, these are obvious statements; but consequently, our future cities will be successful only if they are built by consensus to meet the needs of all of the people who inhabit them. “Smarter” solutions will only achieve their objectives if they are designed and implemented so as to seamlessly integrate into the fabric of our lives. And sometimes the simplest ideas, using the simplest technology – or no technology at all – will be the most powerful.

Smarter Cities start with conversations between people; conversations build trust and understanding, and lead to the creation of new ideas. Many of those ideas are first shaped on pen and paper – often still the least invasive technology for co-creating and recording information that we have. Some of those ideas will be realised through the application of more recent technologies – and in fact will only be possible at all because of them. That is the real value that new technology brings to the future of cities.

But it’s important to get the order right, or we will not achieve the outcomes that we need. Conversations, paper, technology – that might just be the real roadmap for Smarter Cities.

(I would like to thank Steven Boxall for his comments on a previous article on this blog, “No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter“, in the Academy of Urbanism‘s discussion group on Linked-In. Those comments helped me to shape the balance that I hope that I have achieved in this article between the roles that technology, people and conversations will play in creating the future of our cities).

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The future of open urbanism

December 4, 2012 1 Comment

(I’m a guest blogger on UBM’s Future Cities community; this article was published there last week. It builds on themes I first explored here in the article “Open urbanism: why the information economy will lead to sustainable cities“).

(Delegates browsing the exhibition space in Fira Barcelona at the World Bank’s Urban Research and Knowledge Symposium “Rethinking Cities”)

The rapid evolution of sensors, analytics, and automation technologies and their application to city systems such as transport, energy, and utilities offer a glimpse of the future.

These systems will support city populations more efficiently and sustainably. In South Bend, Ind., for example, an analytic system helps to predict and prevent wastewater overflows, avoiding the need to invest in hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrades for the system’s physical capacity.

However, the real power of these intelligent infrastructures is in their ability to influence our choices.

Stockholm’s road-use charging system, for example, influences the behaviour of travelers considering driving into the city and has reduced congestion and improved environmental quality.

At the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” Symposium in Barcelona in October, I took part in a panel discussion on whether this approach of including “externalities” (such as social and environmental costs) in prices would encourage widespread adoption of sustainable behaviours. The panel concluded that, whilst pricing is a useful tool, it’s not the only one and not sufficient on its own.

(The remainder of this article, which explores the opportunity for technology to encourage sustainable choices, can be found on UBM’s Future Cities site, as “The Future of Open Urbanism“).

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No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter

November 30, 2012 5 Comments

(The Bristol Pound, a local currency intended to encourage and reinforce local trading synergies.)

It’s been a busy week for cities in the UK; and we should draw important insights from its events.

On Monday, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB); Department of Business, Innovation and Skills; and the British Standards Institution were the sponsors of a meeting in London to establish a UK “Future Cities Network”. One of their objectives was to build a consensus from the UK to contribute to the City Protocol initiative launched at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona this month.

Wednesday and Thursday saw the society of IT managers in local government (SOCITM) hold its annual conference in Birmingham. This community includes the technology leaders of the UK’s city authorities; many of them are driving the transformation to shared public services in their regions; and exploring the opportunities this transformation provides to improve service quality and outcomes, as well as reducing costs.

Finally, it’s been a week of mixed news for Future Cities: the Technology Strategy Board shortlisted 4 UK cities as the finalists in their competition to host a £25 million “Future Cities Demonstrator” project.

This is clearly fantastic news for the cities concerned – London, Glasgow, Peterborough and Bristol – and they should be congratulated for their achievement. But it also means that 22 other cities who submitted proposals to the TSB have learned over the past two days that they will not benefit from this investment.

Whilst the TSB’s competition – and their progress in setting up the related “Future Cities Catapult Centre” – have been great catalysts to encourage cities in the UK to shape their thinking about the future, the decisions this week throw the real challenge they face into sharp focus:

No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter.

The TSB investment of £25 million is astonishingly generous; but it will nevertheless be only a small contribution to the city that receives it; and the role of innovation stimulus organisations such as the TSB and the European Union’s FP7 programme is only to fund the first, exploratory initiatives; not to support their widespread adoption by cities everywhere.

The UK government’s “City Deals” are a great innovation that will give cities more autonomy over taxation and spending. But in reality they will not provide significant sums of new money; especially when compared to the scale of the financial challenge city authorities face. As the Local Government Association commented in their report “Funding outlook for councils from 2010/11 to 2019/20“:

“… councils will not be able to deliver the existing service offer by the end of this decade. Fundamental change is needed to one or both of … the way local services are funded and organised [or the] statutory and citizen expectations of what councils will provide.”

(A station on London’s Underground railway under construction in 1861, from the Science and Society Picture Library)

Some of these changes will be achieved through public sector transformation. The London Borough of Newham, for example, were recognised at the SOCITM Awards Dinner this week for their achievements in reducing costs and improving service quality through implementation of a successful transformation to online channels for many services.

This is a remarkable achievement for an authority serving one of London’s least affluent boroughs, demanding careful and innovative thinking about the provision of digital services to communities and citizens who may not have access to broadband connectivity or traditional computers. Newham have concentrated on the delivery of services through mobile telephones – which are much more widely owned than PCs and laptops – and  in contexts where a friend or family member assists the ultimate service user.

But local authority transformations of this sort won’t create intelligent transport solutions; or trigger a transformation to renewable energy sources; or improve the resilience of food supply to city populations.

In the UK, many of those services are supported by physical infrastructures that were first constructed in the Victorian era, more than a century ago. Through pride and vision – and the determination to out-do each other – the industrialists, engineers and philanthropists who created those infrastructures dramatically over-engineered them. We are now using them to support many times the population that existed when they were designed and built.

As competition for resources such as food, energy and water intensifies, driven by both a growing global population and by rapid improvements in living standards in emerging economies, these infrastructures will increasingly struggle to support us at the cost, and with the level of resilience, that we have become accustomed to. And whilst they are now often owned and operated by private sector organisations, or by public-private partnerships, the private sector is in no better position to address the challenges faced by cities than the public sector.

In the recent recession and the current slow recovery from it, many companies have failed, lost business, and reduced their workforce. And as the Guardian reported this week, whilst many business leaders take sustainability seriously and attempt to build it into their business models, the financial markets do not recognise those objectives in share prices; and do not offer investment vehicles that support them.

So if government and the financial markets can’t or won’t pay cities to become smarter, how are we going to re-engineer city infrastructures to be more intelligent and sustainable?

In my view, the key is to look at four ways in which money is already spent; and to harness that spending power to achieve the outcomes that cities need.

1. Encourage Venture Capital Investment

(Photo of the “Container City” incubation hub for social enterprises operated by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies in Sunderland)

The current economic climate has not stopped investors and venture capitalists from investing in exciting new businesses. Some of the businesses they are investing in are using technology to offer innovative services in cities. For example, Shutl and Carbon Voyage both use recently emerged technologies to match capacity and demand across networks of transport suppliers.

The systems that these businesses operate have the potential to catalyse local economic trading opportunities – and in so doing, safeguard or create jobs; to lower the carbon footprint of travel and distribution within cities; and to offer new and valuable services to city residents, workers and visitors.

Several cities, including Dublin and Sunderland, are engaged in an ongoing conversation with their local community of technology, business and social entrepreneurs to encourage and support them in developing new, sustainable business models of this sort that promote the social, environmental and economic objectives of the city.

These investments are not on the scale of the tens or hundreds of millions of pounds that would be required to completely overhaul city infrastructures; but they are complemented by the revenues the businesses earn. In this way, consumer, retail and business spending can be harnessed to contribute to the evolution of Smarter Cities.

2. Build Markets, not Infrastructure

Transport is an example of a city system that is not usually considered a marketplace; that’s one of the reasons why the entrepreneurial businesses that I mentioned in the previous section, which effectively create new markets for transport capacity, are so innovative.

But some city systems  already operate as marketplaces; such as energy in the UK, where consumers are free to switch between providers relatively easily. The fact that city infrastructures are already market-like to a degree is combining with trends in engineering to create exciting new developments.

As both international and national policies to encourage sustainable energy generation and use take effect; and as some fossil fuels become scarcer or more expensive, new power generation capacity is increasingly based on renewable energy sources such as wind, hydro-electric, tidal, geo-thermal and biological sources.

A challenge associated with some of those energy sources is that their generating capacity is small compared to their cost and physical impact. Wind farms, for example, take up vastly more space than gas- and coal-powered energy generation facilities, and produce only a fraction of their output.

(Photo by Greg Marshall of the rocks known as “The Needles” just off the coast of the Isle of Wight; illustrating the potential for the island to exploit wave and tidal energy sources)

However, for other power sources, a reduction in scale could be an advantage. The European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) at Aston University in Birmingham, for example, exploit technologies that can recover energy from sewage and food waste. Those technologies can already be implemented on a small-enough scale that the city of Birmingham is setting up a local power distribution company to exploit a bio-energy power generation plant that EBRI will operate at Aston University. And the New Optimists, a community of scientists and industry leaders in Birmingham are considering on Birmingham’s behalf the possibility that such generation technology could eventually operate in city neighbourhoods and communities, or even within individual residences.

For all of these reasons, there is considerable interest at present in the formation of new, localised marketplaces in power generation and consumption. Ecoisland, a community initiative on the Isle of Wight, is perhaps at the forefront of this movement. Their objective is to make the Isle of Wight self-sufficient in energy; because their approach to meeting that objective is to form a new market, they are winning considerable investment from the financial markets due to the profit-making potential of that market.

3. Procure Infrastructure Smartly

City Authorities and property developers spend substantial sums of money on city infrastructures and related services. But the requirements and scoring systems of those procurements are often very traditional, and create no incentive for the providers of infrastructure services to offer innovative solutions.

Some flagship projects – such as Stockholm’s congestion-charging scheme and the smart metering programme in Dubuque, for example – have shown the tremendous potential of “Smarter” solutions. But their effectiveness is to some degree specific to their local context; relatively high levels of taxation are acceptable in Scandinavian society, for example, in return for high quality public service outcomes. Such levels of taxation are not so acceptable elsewhere.

There is tremendous scope for more creative and innovative approaches to procurement of city services to encourage service providers to offer “Smarter” solutions; Birmingham Science City’s Jackie Homan describred some of those possibilities very eloquently recently. The more urgently city authorities adopt those approaches, the sooner they are likely to benefit from the innovation that their infrastructure partners have the potential to provide.

(The Olympic flame at Vancouver’s Winter Olympics photographed by Evan Leeson)

4. Work With Ethical Investors

Finally, notwithstanding the challenges described in the Guardian article that I linked to above, some financial institutions do offer support for “Smart” and sustainable initiatives.

Vancouver’s “Change Everything” online community, for example, was an early pioneer in exploiting the power of social media to support social and environmental initiatives; it was created by Vancouver’s Credit Union, Vancity, a financial institution with social objectives.

Similarly, Sustainable Enterprise Strategies, who provide crucial support and incubation services to businesses and social enterprises in the most challenged communities in Sunderland, are supported by the UK’s Co-Operative Bank; and IBM and Citi-Group have collaborated to create a financing solution for city’s to invest in Streetline’s “Smart Parking” solution, which has reduced both traffic congestion and environmental pollution in cities such as San Francisco.

These are just some of the ways in which financial institutions have already been engaged to support Smarter Cities initiatives. They can surely be persuaded to do so more extensively by proposals that may have social or environmental objectives, but that are also well-formed from a financial perspective.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”

All of the initiatives that I’ve described in this article are are already under way. As the science fiction author William Gibson memorably said – in what is now the last century – “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”.

We should not wait for new, large-scale sources of Smarter City funding to appear before we start to transform our cities – we cannot afford to; and it’s simply not going to happen. What we must do is look at the progress that is already being made by cities, entrepreneurs and communities across the world, and follow their example.

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Inspirational Simpli-City

November 22, 2012 4 Comments

(Recycling bins in Curitiba, Brazil photographed by Ana Elisa Ribeiro)

In the past few years, terms such as “Smart Cities” and “Future Cities” have emerged to capture the widespread sense that the current decade is one in which trends in technology, the economy, demographics and the environment are coinciding in an exciting and meaningful way.

Common patterns have emerged in the technology platforms that enable us to address these economic, social and environmental challenges. For example, the “Digital Cities Exchange” research programme at Imperial College, London; the “FI-WARE” project researching the core platform for the “future internet”; the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC)“; and IBM’s own “Intelligent Operations Centre” all share a similar architecture.

I think of these platforms as 21st Century “civic infrastructures”. They will provide services that can be composed into new city systems and local marketplaces. Those services will include the management of personal data and identity; authentication; local currencies; micro-payments; and the ability to access data about city systems, amongst others.

But whilst some trends in technology are technically cohesive and can be defined by a particular architecture – as was the case for client/server computing, distributed computing, the initial emergence of the mobile internet, or Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) – other trends are more nebulous.

Five years ago, my role for IBM was to develop and evangelise the opportunities that social computing  and “Web 2.0” represented for our customers. Whilst various patterns emerged to express the ways in which technology at that time could provide new value to businesses, communities and individuals, no single technology or platform accompanied the trend. Rather, “Web 2.0” was the label for a period in time in which the internet and related technologies once again became a valuable source of innovation following the “dot.com crash”. Tim O’Reilly, widely credited with coining the term “Web 2.0”, acknowledged this interpretation in his “How to succeed in 2007” interview with CNN.

Cities are such complex systems of systems, and face such a multitude of challenges in a rich variety of contexts, that no single technology solution could possibly address them all. In fact an incredibly rich variety of technologies has already been used to create “Smart” systems in cities. But whilst I’m preparing an article that I hope to publish on this blog next week that lays out a framework for considering those technologies systematically, there’s a more fundamental observation that’s worth making:

Some of the technologies at the heart of urban innovations are incredibly simple.

(The conceptual architecture for the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities” research project)

15 years ago, I lived through the transformation of a city neighbourhood that illustrates this point. It involved community activism and crowdsourced information, enabled by an accessible technology – analogue photography.

As a University student in Birmingham, I lived in rented accommodation in the city’s Balsall Heath area. Balsall Heath has one of Birmingham’s largest Muslim communities, in addition to its substantial student population.

And, for the best part of half a century from the 1950s to the 1990s, it was Birmingham’s “red light” district, the centre of prostitution in the city.

At the time, Balsall Heath’s prostitution trade was so open that Cheddar Road – just across the street from the house that I lived in – was the only road in the UK with houses with “red light” front rooms.

Balsall Heath was clearly a district with substantial differences in culture – which were accommodated very peacefully, I should say. But in 1994, members of the Muslim community decided to change their neighbourhood. They put out old sofas and chairs on street corners, and sat on them each night, photographing anyone walking or driving around the area seeking prostitutes. Those simple steps tapped into the social motivations of those people and had a powerfully discouraging effect on them. Over the course of a year, prostitution was driven out of Balsall Heath for the first time in 50 years. It has never returned, and the district and its communities were strengthened as a result. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has referred to the achievements of Balsall Heath’s community as an inspiration for his “Big Society” initiative.

I have just given a very simplified description of a complex set of events and issues; and in particular, I did not include the perspective of the working women who were perhaps the most vulnerable people involved. But this example of a simple technology (analogue photography) applied by a community to improve their district, with an understanding of the personal and social motivations that affect individual behaviour and choice, is an example that I have been regularly reminded of throughout my work in social media and Smarter Cities.

(Photo from Digital Balsall Heath of residents warning kerb-crawlers on Cheddar Road in the 1990s that they would be watched and recorded)

The city systems facing economic, demographic and environmental challenges today are immensely complex. They provide life-support for city populations – feeding, transporting, and educating them; providing healthcare; and supporting individuals, communities and businesses. As we continue to optimise their operation to support larger, more dense urban populations, maintaining their resilience is a significant challenge.

At the same time, though, the simplicity of Balsall Heath’s community action in the 1990s is inspirational; and there are many other examples.

Jaime Lerner started one of the earliest and most effective city recycling programmes in the world by harnessing the enthusiasm of children to influence the behaviour of their parents. In Mexico City a new “bartering market” allows residents to exchange recyclable waste material for food. In Kenya, SMS messages are used to optimise the distribution of malaria medication between local pharmacists; and in Australia, OzHarvest redistribute excess food from restaurants and hotels to charities supporting the vulnerable.

These innovations will not always be simply transferable from one city to another; but they could form the basis of a catalogue or toolkit of re-usable ideas, as was suggested by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in their research on urban innovation in Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, echoing Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“.

As I wrote recently in the article “Zen and the art of messy urbanism“, many of the Smart systems of tomorrow will be surprising innovations that cut across and disrupt the industry sectors and classifications of city systems that we understand today; and in order to provide food, energy, water, transport and other services to city populations, they will need to be robustly engineered. But drawing inspiration from good, simple ideas with their roots in human behaviour rather than new technology is surely a good starting point from which to begin our journey towards discovering them.

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Soft Infrastructures For Smart Cities

November 19, 2012 2 Comments

Birmingham’s new Library, intended to foster conversations and the exchange of knowledge and ideas..

(I’ve recently begun guest blogging at UBM’s new Future Cities site; this was the first article I posted there. It builds on themes I first explored here in the article “The new architecture of Smart Cities“).

At Birmingham’s Smart City Commission, we have been trying to answer an interesting question: What makes the difference between a “smart city” and a city where smart projects take place?

“Smart” projects will occur everywhere in time. Human history is in part the story of our continual adoption of new technologies, and technologies like sensors, actuators, smartphones, analytics, and “big-data” will eventually be adopted across city systems such as transportation, energy, planning, and social services.

But if a city seeks to exploit new technologies across its systems in a coordinated way to address overall goals for regeneration, sustainability, and social and economic growth, how can that be achieved?

Some obvious characteristics can be observed in cities that have successfully pursued this agenda: They have a clear vision, championed by city leaders, and they have invested in technology initiatives such as broadband connectivity and open data.

That’s not enough, though. The behaviour of a city is the aggregate of the activity of the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who live, work, and relax there. A city will not achieve its goals through a smart strategy unless that strategy results in changes to systems that make a difference to all of those individuals.

The challenge for architects and designers is to create infrastructures and services that can become part of the fabric of city life. This will not be achieved simply by applying concepts such as citizen-centric principles to the design of smart city services. That is necessary, but not sufficient. The more important question is: Who has the ability to apply such approaches on behalf of all of the people within a city?

(The remainder of this article can be found on UBM’s Future Cities site, as “Why Cities need Communities“).

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The six steps to a Smarter City; and the philosophical imperative for taking them (updated)

November 13, 2012 3 Comments

(Photo of digital lights in “The Place” in Beijing by Trey Ratcliff)

(This article originally appeared in September 2012 as “Five steps to a Smarter City: and the philosophical imperative for taking them“. Because it contains an overall framework for approaching Smart City transformations, I’ll keep it updated to reflect the latest content on this blog, and ongoing developments in the industry. It can also be accessed through the page link “Six steps to a Smarter City” in the navigation bar above). 

As I remarked last week, in the past months some interesting announcements have been made concerning emerging frameworks and protocols for Smarter Cities – such as the “City Protocol” collaboration which will be formally launched at the Smart City Expo this week in Barcelona.

There are now a wide variety of established and emerging repositories of experience and practise relevant to Smart Cities in such domains as sustainability, technology, community engagement and economic development. Some are open collaborations; some are research programmes; and some are published position papers from consultancies and service providers. It therefore seems an opportune time to update the article “Five steps to a Smarter City” I wrote in September, to include a sixth step: “Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise“:

  1. Define what a “Smarter City” means to you
  2. Convene a stakeholder group to create a specific Smarter City vision
  3. Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise
  4. Populate a roadmap that can deliver the vision
  5. Put the financing in place
  6. Thinking beyond the future: how to make “Smarter” a self-sustaining process … and a philosophical imperative for doing so

1. Define what a “Smarter City” means to you

Many urbanists and cities have grappled with how to define what a “Smart City”, a “Smarter City” or a “Future City” might be. It’s important for cities to agree to use an appropriate definition because it sets the scope and focus for what will be a complex collective journey of transformation.

In his article “The Top 10 Smart Cities On The Planet“, Boyd Cohen of Fast Company defined a Smart City as follows:

“Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICT) to be more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life, and reduced environmental footprint–all supporting innovation and the low-carbon economy.”

This definition shares a useful distinction that was made to me by the Technology Strategy Board‘s Head of Sustainability, Richard Miller: a “Smart City” is one that transforms itself into a “Future City” by using technology. In IBM we use the phrase “Smarter City” to describe a city that is making progress on that path.

As is frequently quoted, more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas; and in the UK where I live, that’s true of more than 90% of us. So its not surprising that so many people have strong views on what Smart, Smarter and Future Cities should be.

Personally I think that a useful and holistic definition of a “Future City” needs to include the following concepts:

  • A Future City is in a position to make a success of the present: for example, it is economically active in high-value industry sectors and able to provide the workforce and infrastructure that companies in those sectors need.
  • A Future City is on course for a successful future: with an education system that provides the skills that will be needed by future industries as technology evolves.
  • A Future City creates sustainable, equitably distributed growth: where education and employment opportunities are widely available to all citizens and communities, and with a focus on delivering social and environmental outcomes as well as economic growth.
  • A Future City operates as efficiently & intelligently as possible: so that resources such as energy, transportation systems and water are used optimally, providing a low-cost, low-carbon basis for economic and social growth, and an attractive, healthy environment in which to live and work.
  • A Future City enables citizens, communities, entrepreneurs & businesses to do their best; because making infrastructures Smarter is an engineering challenge; but making cities Smarter is a societal challenge; and those best placed to understand how societies can change are those who can innovate within them.

If those objectives provide – an admittedly very generic – view of what a “Future City” is, then a “Smarter City” is one that uses technology to accomplish them.

Creating a more specific vision is a task for each city to undertake for itself, taking into account its unique character, strengths and challenges. This process usually entails a collaborative act of creativity by city stakeholders.

(The members of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission)

2. Convene a stakeholder group to create a specific Smarter City vision

For a city to agree a shared “Smarter City” vision involves bringing an unusual set of stakeholders together in a single forum: political leaders, community leaders, major employers, transport and utility providers, entrepreneurs and SMEs, universities and faith groups, for example. The task for these stakeholders is to agree a vision that is compelling, inclusive; and specific enough to drive the creation of a roadmap of individual projects and initiatives to move the city forward.

This is a process that I’m proud to be taking part in in Birmingham through the City’s Smart City Commission. I discussed how such processes can work, and some of the challenges and activities involved, back in July in an article entitled “How Smarter Cities Get Started“.

3. Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise

Any holistic approach to a Smarter City needs to recognise the immensely complex context that a city represents: a rich “system of systems” comprising the physical environment, economy, transport and utility systems, communities, education and many other services, systems and human activities.

In “The new architecture of Smart Cities” I laid out a framework  for thinking about that context; in particular highlighting the need to focus on the “soft infrastructure” of conversations, trust, relationships and engagement between people, communities, enterprises and institutions that is fundamental to establishing a consensual view of the future of a city.

In that article  I also asserted that whilst in Smarter Cities we are often concerned with the application of technology to city systems, the context in which we do so – i.e. our understanding of the city as a whole – is the same context as that in which other urban professionals operate: architects, town planners and policy-makers, for example. An implication is that when looking for expertise to inform an approach to “Smarter Cities”, we should look broadly across the field of urbanism, and not restrict ourselves to that material which pertains specifically to the application of technology to cities.

So whilst  “City Protocol” seems to be the strongest emerging initiative to determine frameworks and standards for approaching Smarter Cities – and certainly should be considered by any city starting on that path – there are other resources that can be drawn on.

UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for human settlements, recently published its “State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013” report. UNHABITAT promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities, and their reports and statistics on urbanisation are frequently cited as authoritative. Their 2012/2013 report includes extensive consultation with cities around the world, and proposes a number of new mechanisms intended to assist decision-makers. It focuses extensively on South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East; but also considers a number of European and North American examples.

(The components of a Smart City architecture I described in “The new architecture of Smart Cities“)

The World Bank’s Urban Development page contains a number of reports covering many aspects of urbanisation relevant to Smarter Cities, such as “Transforming Cities with Transit”, “Urban Risk Assessments: Towards a Common Approach” and a forthcoming report in December to promote “sustainable urban development through cross-sector integration by focusing on the careful coordination of transit and land development”. At the Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” symposium in Barcelona in October, they also announced that they would be publishing a book of the same title containing a set of viewpoints on similar themes.

The Academy of Urbanism, a UK-based not-for-profit association of several hundred urbanists including policy-makers, architects, planners and academics, publishes the “Friebrug Charter for Sustainable Urbanism” in collaboration with the city of Frieburg, Germany. Frieburg won the Academy’s European City of the Year award in 2010 but its history of recognition as a sustainable city goes back further. The charter contains a number of useful principles and ideas for achieving consensual sustainability that can be applied to Smarter Cities.

A number of current research programmes are seeking to define more technical standards for achieving the interoperability between city systems that underpins many Smarter City ideas. Imperial College in the UK have established the Digital City Exchange initiative; Imperial have a depth of expertise across urban systems such as transport and energy, and are working with a number of academic and industry partners.

The European Union Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC) project is similarly researching  architectures and standards for Smart Cities technology infrastructure – my colleagues in IBM and at Birmingham City Universityare amongst the participants. Finally, the “FI-WARE” project, also funded by the European Union, is researching architectures and standards for a “future internet platform”: one of its focusses is the integration of city systems, and particularly how cities can provide technology infrastructures on which SMEs and entrepreneurs can base innovative new city services.

With the UK Technology Strategy Board continuing to invest through it’s “Future Cities” programme (link requires registration) and the EU announcing new investments in Smart Cities recently, research activity in this area will surely grow.

Consultancies, technology and service providers also offer useful views. IBM’s own perspectives and case studies can be found at http://www.ibm.com/smartercities/; Arup have published a number of viewpoints, including “Information Marketplaces: the new economics of cities“; and McKinsey’s recent report “Government designed for new times: a global conversation” contains a number of sections dedicated to technology and Smarter Cities.

Finally, the large number of “Smart Cities” and “Future Cities” communities on the web are good sources of emerging new knowledge, such as UBM’s “Future Cities” site; the Sustainable Cities Collective; and Linked-In discussion Groups such as “Smart Cities and City 2.0“, “Smarter Cities” and “Smart Urbanism“.

4. Populate a roadmap that can deliver the vision

In order to fulfill a vision for a Smarter City, a roadmap of specific projects and initiatives is needed, including both early “quick wins” and longer term strategic programmes.

Those projects and initiatives take many forms; and it can be worthwhile to concentrate initial effort on those that are simplest to execute because they are within the remit of a single organisation; or because they build on cross-organisational initiatives within cities that are already underway.

In my August article “Five roads to a Smarter City” I gave some ideas of what those initiatives might be, and the factors affecting their viability and timing, including:

  1. Top-down, strategic transformations across city systems;
  2. Optimisation of individual infrastructures such as energy, water and transportation;
  3. Applying “Smarter” approaches to “micro-city” environments such as industrial parks, transport hubs, university campuses or leisure complexes;
  4. Exploiting the technology platforms emerging from the cost-driven transformation to shared services in public sector;
  5. Supporting the “Open Data” movement.

A roadmap consisting of several such individual activities within the context of a set of cross-city goals, and co-ordinated by a forum of cross-city stakeholders, can form a powerful programme for making cities Smarter.

5. Put the financing in place

A crucial factor in assessing the viability of those activities, and then executing them, is putting in place the required financing. There are many ways in which that can be done, and I described several of them in two articles in September:

In “Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part one)“:

And in “Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part two):

I’m a technologist, not a financier or economist; so those articles are not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. But they do suggest a number of practical options that can be explored.

(Meeting with social entrepreneurs in Sunderland who create local innovations in the city)

6. Thinking beyond the future: how to make “Smarter” a self-sustaining process

Once a city has become “Smart”, is that the end of the story?

I don’t think so. The really Smart city is one that has put in place soft and hard infrastructures that can be used in a continuous process of reinvention and creativity.

In the same way that a well designed urban highway should connect rather than divide the city communities it passes through, the new technology platforms put in place to support Smarter City initiatives should be made open to communities and entrepreneurs to constantly innovate in their own local context. I described that process along with some examples of it in “The amazing heart of a Smarter City: the innovation boundary“.

When it works well, the result is the ongoing creation of new products, services or even marketplaces that enable city residents and visitors to make choices every day that reinforce local values and synergies. I described some of the ways in which technology could enable those markets to be designed to encourage transactions that support local outcomes in “From Christmas lights to bio-energy: how technology will change our sense of place“. And the money-flows within those markets can be used as the basis of financing their infrastructure, as I discussed in “Digital Platforms for Smarter City Market-Making“.

(Artist’s impression of a vertical urban farm shared by Curbed SF)

A philosophical imperative

It’s worth at this point reminding ourselves why we’re compelled to make cities Smarter. I’ve often referred to the pressing economic and environmental pressures we’re all aware of as the reasons to act; but they are really only the acute symptoms of an underlying demographic trend and its effect on the behaviour of complex systems within cities.

The world’s population is expected to grow towards 10 billion in 2070; and most of that growth will be within cities. The physicist and biologist Geoffrey West’s work on cities as complex systems showed that larger, denser cities are more successful in creating wealth. That creation of wealth attracts more residents, causing further growth – and further consumption of resources. At some point it’s inevitable that this self-reinforcing growth triggers a crisis.

If this sounds alarmist, consider the level of civic unrest associated with the Eurozone crisis in Greece and Spain; or that in the 2000 strike by the drivers who deliver fuel to petrol stations in the UK, some city supermarkets came within hours of running out of food completely. Or simply look to the frightening global effects of recent grain shortages caused by drought in the US.

Concern over this combination of the cost of resources and uncertainty in their supply has lead to sustainability becoming a critical economic and social issue, not just a long-term environmental one. And it demands changes in the way that cities behave.

As an example of just how far-reaching this thinking has become, consider the supply of food to urban areas. Whilst definitions vary, urban areas are usually defined as continuously built-up areas with a population of at least a few thousand people, living at a density of at least a few hundred people per square kilometer. Actual population densities in large cities are much higher than this, typically a few tens of thousands per square kilometer in developed economies, and sometimes over one hundred thousand per square kilometer in the largest megacities in emerging economies.

In contrast, one square kilometer of intensively farmed land with fertile soil in a good climate can feed approximately 1000 people according to Kate Cooper of the New Optimists forum, which is considering scenarios for Birmingham’s food future in 2050. Those numbers tell us that, then unless some radical new method of growing food appears, cities will never feed themselves, and will continue to rely on importing food from ever larger areas of farmland to support their rising populations.

(Photo by TEDxBrainport of Dr Mark Post explaining how meat can be grown artificially)

As I’ve noted before, such radical new methods are already appearing: artificial meat has been grown in laboratories; and the idea of creating “vertical farms” in skyscrapers is being seriously explored.

But these are surely scientific and engineering challenges; so why do I refer to a philosophical imperative?

I’ve previously referred to artificial meat and vertical farming as examples of “extreme urbanism“. They certainly push the boundaries of our ability to manipulate the natural world. And that’s where the philosophical challenge lies.

Do we regard ourselves as creatures of nature, or as creatures who manipulate nature? To what extent do we want to change the character of the world from which we emerged? As the population of our planet and our cities continues to rise, we will have to confront these questions, and decide how to answer them.

Geoffrey West’s work clearly predicts what will happen if we continue our current course; and I think it is likely that scientists and engineers will rise to the challenge of supporting even larger, denser cities than those we currently have. But personally I don’t think the result will be a world that I will find attractive to live in.

Organisations such as Population Matters campaign carefully and reasonably for an alternative path; an agenda of education, access to opportunity and individual restraint in the size of our families as a means to slow the growth of global population, so that more orthodox solutions can be affective – such as increasing the efficiency of food distribution, reducing food wastage (including our personal food wastage) and changing dietary habits – for instance, to eat less meat.

I don’t claim to know the answer to these challenges, but I’m thankful that they are the subject of urgent research by serious thinkers. The challenge for cities is to understand and incorporate this thinking into their own strategies in ways that are realistic and practical, in order that their Smarter City programmes represent the first steps on the path to a sustainable future.

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Looking forward to December’s Birmingham Science City Digital Working Group

November 9, 2012 Leave a comment

(Millenium Point, home of Birmingham’s Science Museum and Birmingham City University’s Technology Innovation Centre, photographed by Martin Hartland)

Back in September, we held the last meeting of the Birmingham Science City Digital Working Group – my first meeting as chair. We were joined by many enthusiastic representatives of Birmingham and the region’s digital community – entrepreneurs, small businesses, industry interest groups, universities and companies.

We had a thought provoking discussion of how the Digital Working Group can continue to be a valued forum and a catalyst for its members to share insight, create new ideas, and discover new opportunities in the digital economy; contributing to and benefitting from the Birmingham Science City objectives to create “scientific, technological and economic advantage for wealth, opportunity and worth”. In such a challenging economy, with funding for innovation and enterprise in short supply, such exchanges can stimulate new activity by increasing awareness of the resources that are nevertheless available.

The consensus we seemed to reach was that the working group could do that by:

  • Bringing together stakeholders from our digital community who are aware of problems and challenges, and those who may be aware of solutions;
  • Focussing on emerging opportunities for technology to contribute to Birmingham Science City’s economic and social objectives, but for which the business models are not yet clear;
  • Using social media between meetings to explore specific topics within those broad criteria so that each face-to-face meeting has a clear agreed agenda beforehand;
  • And continuing to use the group to provide updates between members, and in particular an update on current opportunities to access funds and resources.

As an example of the sorts of disruptive emerging technologies we might like to consider for our focuses, I found a couple of short videos interesting recently. The first, from the Financial Times, focuses on three small businesses in Shoreditch who are combining information technology, social media and advanced manufacturing in what the FT called “Industry 2.0”; a good example of the disruptive opportunities that are created when capabilities from different sectors are converged. The second is this presentation of an idea called “being nicely messy” presented by the Collaborative Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) to the Audi Urban Future Awards 2012; the idea tries to capture the way in which innovation emerges in unexpected forms from Mumbai’s economy and physical environment as entrepreneurs search for gaps and opportunities in the market and use whatever resources are available to them to respond. The full report of the project is worth a read, and contains these excerpts:

“New patterns of work emerged as the new entrepreneurs struggled to survive and settle. they occupied varied locations and blurred the distinction between formality and informality …

… the entrepreneurs of Mumbai have innovatively occupied city spaces maximizing their efficiency …

… the blurry / messy condition further contributes to the high transactional capacity of the urban form.”

These remarks emphasise to me the need for us to be very open in considering where innovation and opportunity might emerge from; and what form it might take. The markets, business models and technologies we know today are in many cases unrecognisable from the world of only a few years ago; we should expect any and all of our assumptions to be challenged by the innovations that emerge in the very near future.

With these thoughts and provocations in mind, I’m thinking of organising the agenda of our next meeting, which will be in early December, around the following topics:

  • Introduction and review of the last meeting
  • Update on innovation investment and support
    • An update on current trends in funding – e.g. from a local venture capitalist, or an update on tax credits for Research and Development from a Digital Working Group member
    • An update on funding and projects from Birmingham Science City
  • Introduction to the theme for the meeting
  • Provocation
    • An alternative viewpoint from Birmingham Science City – i.e. from somebody outside the usual Digital Working Group Community; and perhaps in this case from the Low Carbon Working Group, as discussed at our last meeting
  • Creative discussion:
    • How can Birmingham’s digital community exploit this theme, and how can the Digital Working Group help?
  • Next steps, and discussion of the agenda for the next meeting

(Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch, Birmingham’s three fathers of the Industrial Revolution, photographed by Neil Howard)

So what should our “theme” be?

In our last meeting we agreed that the area of Low Carbon technology was an interesting one for us to explore; and there are already interesting initiatives underway in that area in Birmingham, such as the “Birmingham Energy Savers” project, and the European Bio-Energy Research Institute, who are seeking to establish a regional supply chain of SMEs to support their work to develop small-scale, sustainable technology for recovering energy from waste food and sewage.

So my suggested theme is:

“How can the Birmingham Science City Digital Working Group create or stimulate innovation using digital technology to contribute to a low carbon economy – whether in the transport and energy sectors or elsewhere?”

If the Digital Working Group is able to do that, it could help Birmingham’s economy access the investment resources available to support low carbon innovation; potentially assisting in the creation of jobs, as well as lowering the city’s carbon footprint and improving its physical environment.

This discussion, in fact, reminds me of some important statements in Birmingham Science City’s Constitution; the constitution states that Birmingham Science City should stimulate collaborative innovation in using science and technology to create wealth, opportunity and worth by:

“Developing activities that increase public appreciation of the application of Science & Technology and the economic, employment and quality of life benefits that it can bring.”

and:

“Encouraging collective maintenance and development of resources for innovation including finance and physical infrastructure.”

I’d like this suggestion to be the start of a discussion; hence I’m making it in this public forum, and posting links to it in several discussion groups on Linked-In as well as sending it to the Digital Working Group members by e-mail.

I look forward to hearing from the Digital Working Group members – or any other interested parties – for comments and feedback to my proposal for the next meeting.

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Zen and the art of messy urbanism

November 7, 2012 11 Comments

(Children playing in the “Science Garden” outside Birmingham’s Science Museum at Millenium Point; part of the new Eastside City Park, a vast urban space surrounded by education, culture and manufacturing.)

Over the past few months and weeks, some interesting announcements have been made concerning emerging frameworks and protocols for Smarter Cities.

Perhaps the highest profile was the formation of the “City Protocol” collaboration in Barcelona, which will be formally launched at the Smart City Expo later this month. The protocol has been established to identify and capture emerging practises and standards to promote interoperability across city systems and enable progress towards city-level goals to be stimulated, coordinated and measured.

More recently, UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for human settlements which promotes socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities, and a source frequently referred to for statistics concerning the progress of urbanisation, published its “State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013” report, which includes extensive consultation with cities around the world. It proposes a number of new mechanisms which are intended to assist decision makers in cities.

These resources of knowledge and experience will be key to helping cities face the grand challenge of demographics, economics and sustainability that is becoming acute. In a paper published in the respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature, Professors Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt described it as “the greatest challenge that the planet has faced since humans became social“; and we have already seen evidence of its urgency. The “Barnett graph of doom“, for example, famously predicted that within 20 years, unless significant changes in public services are made, cities will be unable to afford to provide any services except social care; the UK’s energy regulator Ofgem’s recently warned that the country could experience power shortages in the winter of 2015-2016; and there is concern that this year’s drought in the US will once again cause food shortages across the world.

However, we should not expect that cities will reach a sustainable future state through the process of city leaders and institutions adopting a deterministic framework or method. Such an approach may work when applied to the transformation of organisations and their formal relationships with partners; but cities are more fundamentally complex “systems of systems” incorporating vast numbers of autonomous agents and interrelationships.

The Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) recently produced a fascinating piece of research, “Being Nicely Messy“, about the evolution of Mumbai’s economy in this context. As a background for the transformative changes taking place, they state that:

“While the population in Mumbai grew by 25% between 1991 and 2010, the number of people traveling by trains during the same years increased by 66% and number of vehicles grew by 181%. At the same time, the number of enterprises in the city increased by 56%. All of this indicates a restructuring of the economy, where the nature of work and movement has changed.”

Rather than focus on the policies and approaches of the city’s institutions, CRIT’s research focussed on the activities of everyday entrepreneurs in Mumbai – average people, finding a way to make their livelihood within the city:

“… new patterns of work emerged as the new entrepreneurs struggled to survive and settle. they occupied varied locations and blurred the distinction between formality and informality; legality and illegality as all of them produced legitimate commodities and services.”

“… the entrepreneurs of Mumbai have innovatively occupied city spaces maximizing their efficiency …”

“… the blurry / messy condition … contributes to the high transactional capacity of the urban form.”

“… mumbai’s urbanism is like a froth with overlapping ecosystems of geographies, legislations, claims, powers, kinships, friendships & information.”

Crucially, CRIT relate this “messy” innovative activity to the ability of individuals within the city to access opportunities to create their own wealth and livelihood within the city and its changing economy:

“… mobility or to mobilize is the ability to navigate the complex urban ecosystem of geographies, legislations, claims, powers, relationships and information to construct one’s path for the future amidst these movements.”

(Photo by lecercle of a girl in Mumbai doing her homework on whatever flat surface she could find. Her use of a stationary tool usually employed for physical mobility to enhance her own social mobility is an example of the very basic capacity we all have to use the resources available to us in innovative ways)

This sort of organic innovation takes place continuously in cities, and increasingly exploits technology resources as well as the capacity of the physical urban environment and its transport systems. For example I wrote recently about the community innovation that’s taking place in Birmingham currently; including “social media surgeries” and “hacking” weekends. There is currently a considerable hope that this adoption of technology by community innovators will enable them to achieve an impact on cities as a whole.

But creating sustainable, scalable new enterprises and city services from these innovations is not straightforward. After analysing the challenges that have caused many such initiatives to achieve only temporary results, O’Reilly Radar wrote recently that cities seeking to sustainably exploit open data and hacktivism need to invest in “sustainability, community, and civic value”; and San Francisco announced a series of measures, including both legislation for open data and the appointment of a “Chief Data Officer” for the city, intended to achieve that. I have previously argued that in addition, cities should analyse the common technology services required to support these innovations in a secure and scalable way, and make them available to communities, innovators and entrpreneurs.

For this to happen, new relationships are required between city institutions, their service delivery and technology partners, communities, entrepreneurs, businesses, social enterprises and all of the other very varied stakeholders in the city ecosystem. I’ve previously described the conversations and creation of trust required to build these relationships as a “soft infrastructure” for cities; and new models of collaborative decision-making and activity such as “constellations” and “articulations” are emerging to describe them.

It’s very important to not be too structured in our thinking about soft infrastructure. There is a temptation to revert to thinking in silos, and assume that city communities can be segmented into areas of separate concern such as neighbourhoods, sectors such as “digital entrepreneurs”, or service user communities such as “commuters”. To do this is to forget where and how innovation and the creation of new value often occurs.

Michael Porter, creator of the famous “five forces” model of business, and his colleagues have written that new value is often created when capabilities – and technologies – are converged across sectors. In 2006,  IBM’s worldwide survey of CEOs in public and private sector carried out with The Economist’s Intelligence Unit identified several different areas of innovation: products and services, markets, operations and business models. In particular, innovations that use new business models to offer products and services that transcend and even disrupt existing market structures have the potential to create the most value.

The CRIT research recognised this need to blur boundaries; and went further to state that imposing formal boundaries inhibits the transactions that create value in the economy and society of cities. Tim Stonor has written and presented extensively on the idea that a city should be a “transaction engine”; and many urbanists have asserted that it is the high density of interactions that cities make possible that have led to the city becoming the predominant form of human habitation.

(Photo by Halans of volunteers collecting food for OzHarvest, who redistribute excess food from restaurants and hotels in Australian cities to charities supporting the vulnerable.)

Human thinking creates boundaries in the world; our minds recognise patterns and we impose those patterns on our perceptions and understanding. But this can inhibit our ability to recognise new possibilities and opportunities. Whilst many useful patterns do seem to be emerging from urban innovation – a re-emergence of bartering and local exchanges, social enterprises and community interest companies, sustainable districts, for example – it’s far too early for us to determine a market segmentation for the application of those models across city systems. Rather than seeking to stimulate innovation within specific sectors, CRIT argue instead for the provision of catalogues of “tools” that can be used by innovators in whatever context is appropriate for them.

The European Bio-Energy Research Institute in Birmingham, for example, is seeking to establish a regional supply chain of SMEs to support its work to develop small-scale, sustainable technology for recovering energy from waste food and sewage; in Mexico City, a new bartering market allows residents to exchange recyclable waste material for food; and in the UK the “Eco-Island” Community Interest Company is establishing a local smart-grid on the Isle of Wight to harness sustainable energy sources to enable the entire island to become self-sufficient in energy. These very different models are converging city systems such as food, waste and energy and disrupting the traditional models for supporting them.

In “The Way of Zen“, Alan Watts comments of Zen art that “the very technique involves the art of artlessness, or what Sabro Hasegawa has called the ‘controlled accident’, so that paintings are formed as naturally as the rocks and grasses which they depict”. Just as the relentless practise of technique can enable artists to have “beautiful accidents” when inspiration strikes; so cities should look to provide more effective tools to innovators for them to exploit in whatever context they can create new value. We should not expect the results always to be neat and tidy; and nor should our approach to encouraging them be.

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